Statement from the National Assembly of People’s Power

IN the wake of a media campaign mounted by powerful corporations, fundamentally in Europe, which have ferociously attacked Cuba, and after a dirty debate, the European Parliament has just passed a resolution of condemnation against our country that manipulates sentiments, brandishes lies and conceals realities.

The pretext utilized was the death of a prisoner, initially sentenced for a common crime and subsequently manipulated by U.S. interests and mercenaries at its service, who, of his own free will, refused to eat, despite warnings from and intervention by Cuban medical specialists.

This lamentable event cannot be utilized to condemn Cuba by adducing that a death could have been avoided. If there is one field in which our country does not have to defend itself in words, given that the reality is irrefutable, it is in that of the fight for the lives of human beings, whether born in Cuba or in other countries. Just one example is the presence of Cuban doctors in Haiti for more than 11 years prior to the earthquake in January of this year, a fact silenced by the hegemonic press.

Behind that condemnation lies profound cynicism. How many children’s lives have been lost in poor nations because of the decision by rich countries represented in the European Parliament not to meet their commitments to development aid? All of them knew it was a mass death sentence, but they opted to preserve the levels of waste and the continuation of consumerism to suicide in the long term.

We Cubans are also offended by that attempt to teach us a lesson at a time when immigrants and the unemployed are being repressed in Europe, but while here, in neighborhood meetings, people are proposing their candidates for municipal elections, freely and without intermediaries.

Those countries which participated in or allowed the clandestine air transport of detainees, the establishment of illegal prisons, and the practice of torture, lack the ethical authority to pass moral judgments on a people under attack and brutally blockaded.

Such a discriminatory and selective condemnation can only be explained by the failure of a policy incapable of bringing a heroic people to their knees. Neither the Helms Burton Act, nor the European common position, which emerged in the same year in the same circumstances and with the same purpose, both of them damaging to our national sovereignty and dignity, have the most minimal future, because we Cubans reject imposition, intolerance and pressure as a norm within international relations.